Miscellany (General)

by dhw, Wednesday, May 19, 2021, 09:35 (1074 days ago) @ David Turell

BATS
DAVID: Anything is possible. Secondhand design is very impractical.

dhw: That depends on what the design is for. If your God wanted an ever-changing bush of life, what could be more practical than an almost infinite variety of intelligent organisms autonomously dealing with an almost infinite variety of situations and making their own decisions and designs, culminating in humans...

DAVID: That assume a different God from the one I believe in whose final goal was humans with consciousness.

And with free will, which shows that your God does not want total control, and which also shows the logical split in your theory, which consists in your belief that he designed every single life form, food supply etc., 99% of which had no connection with humans, although his one and only goal was humans and their food supply.

The obstetric dilemma
DAVID: Instant solutions don't occur naturally. That is always my point. God speciates.

dhw: So you still insist that every adaptation and every cure and every symbiotic relationship and every strategy in life's history was either pre-programmed 3.8 billion years ago or has been directly dabbled beforehand, in anticipation, by your God.

DAVID: I've not changed.

You’ve been telling me that I'm the only person in the world who believes that in the process of adaptation, solutions follow on in response to problems. I have a sneaking suspicion that in fact most people would agree with me and you would find yourself in comparative isolation, but I have to admire your doggedness.

Different species cooperate
DAVID: Note today's entries about bird brains and their intelligence which I fully accept. Octopi are very intelligent, considering their antics in study laboratories.

dhw: So why do you restrict their actions to “instinct”?

DAVID: The octopus helped the grouper. It was not clear in the description the grouper really helped the octopus.

How does that come to mean that the octopus acts through instinct and not intelligence?

Weird dinoflagellates
QUOTE: "It shows that nature can work in a completely different way than we thought,” says Salazar. “There are so many possibilities for what could have happened as life evolved.'"

DAVID: Perhaps common descent is not so 'common'.

dhw: Perhaps from the start cells were endowed with the means to design their own methods of survival, and that is why we have “so many possibilities”.

DAVID: The only facts we have are epigenetic minor adaptations. I have a God speciates theory to cover the gap of the black box we have about speciation.

Nobody knows how speciation takes place, but at least we have the fact that organisms are capable of making changes to themselves. What facts do you have to support your own theory?

Bird brains’ similar neurons
DAVID: This study shows the key factor in common descent in evolution: what is developed and works well in the past carries into the future evolving forms. The process of evolution is a continuum.

dhw: Yes indeed. Each branch of existence goes its own way to create the vast variety of intelligent insects, birds, fish, mammals etc. plus food supplies, 99% of which diversified away from the bacteria-to-human branch and had no connection with it, thereby rendering absurd the hypothesis that every extinct form on every other branch was “part of the goal of evolving [= specially designing] humans” plus food supply.

DAVID: Thank you for accepting the very necessary food supply from the huge diverse bush.

You don’t need to thank me for accepting the obvious fact that all present and past life forms need/needed food! See below for the distinction between present and past.

DAVID: All natural, with no God in evidence running the process. When I offer this challenge from my belief view, you will slip in a little God lip service. I am not absurd for believing in God.

More silly straw men! The absurdity has nothing to do with your belief in God but lies in your belief that your God specially designed every food supply for every life form although the only part of the huge diverse bush he actually wanted to design was humans and their food supply. First you say that all life forms etc. were “part of the goal to evolve [= specially design] humans”, and then you agree that "extinct life has no role in current time", and past food bushes were for the PAST, not for the present.

Conserved gene order
DAVID: Genomes show common descent. In evolution everything present has a relationship to the past.

Though you also believe that your God created species de novo (e.g. in the Cambrian). Yet another contradiction. But I agree that all branches of the bush go back to the same roots (= common descent). That does not mean that all branches were specially designed as part of the goal of specially designing just one branch.

Different types of neurons
DAVID: What this means is that when we discuss as 150 cc enlargement from erectus to sapiens we cannot know if some different kind of functional neuron was added to sapiens. So we know quantity but not true quality of the addition.

I suggest that the addition of functionless neurons would have been pointless. Common sense alone suggests that new neurons would have been needed to fulfil a new requirement.